Cloud computing is the next step in connectivity, accessibility and everything cutting edge as virtualized resources are quickly gaining momentum and will soon change the way we think of/portray the internet entirely. With such advances come obvious questions of security issues as the interface involves a customer’s data existing entirely on ‘virtual machines’ that make it easily accessible to the cloud provider.

The ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop held in Chicago last Friday discussed such issues wherein IBM submitted one of the several papers presented on the issue, highlighting previous research on introspection as the best tool to be incorporated in cloud settings like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. J.R. Rao, Senior Manager, Secure Software and Services, IBM said “In clouds, the barrier to entry is lower, and the thing customers are most concerned about is their information. We want to make sure their information is handled in a manner consistent with their expectation of security and privacy,”

The research by IBM was conducted at its Watson Research Center and Zurich Research Lab leading them to develop a system called ‘introspection monitoring’ which enables the cloud with abilities to scan virtual machines, determining which operating system is being utilized and if its functioning optimally (frisking for malicious codes) Radu Sion, computer scientist at Stony Brook University added, “It works by looking inside the virtual machine and trying to infer what it does. You don’t want malicious clients to give you all kinds of malware in their virtual machines that you will run in the cloud. Today the cloud does not offer privacy, so we might as well use the lack of privacy for introspection”